Sartell Newsleader • www.thenewsleaders.com
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Friday, May 31, 2013
Opinion Our View
Verso ceremony had an eerie resonance
It was an eerie feeling, standing in Veterans Park right after the Memorial Day ceremony Monday and seeing several speakers and audience members choke up with emotion as they talked about the Verso paper-mill disaster and its aftermath. The ceremony for former Verso employees immediately followed the annual Memorial Day ceremony that had just taken place in the same park. That ceremony, as always, was very moving and beautifully done. What made the Verso ceremony so eerie (and moving) is that it was exactly a year ago the explosion and fire at Verso brought an end to so many things: an employee’s life, paper production, jobs, wages and taxes that hugely helped Sartell for more than 100 years. The disaster spelled the end of an amazing century of paper production, which was synonymous with Sartell’s growth and its ultimate success as a dynamic, thriving city. It was eerie, during the ceremony, to gaze across the river and see that baby-blue Verso plant that now has a forlorn, forgotten and haunted look about it. The ceremony was very much like a funeral in which that mill was eulogized, almost as if it itself had been a human being, now deceased. And the ceremony was also eerie because at last year’s Memorial Day event, in the same park, the morning was so beautiful and sunny. Several people there remarked about how impressive the paper mill across the river looked, with radiant-white condensation pluming up into the deep blue sky. Little did any of the Memorial Day participants have any idea in just an hour or so after the ceremony ended, the sky would begin to cloud up and a tragic explosion would cause the end of so many good things. The pain and sorrow remain for so many people, but also what lingers long is a sense of sharing, of beginnings and endings that unite all those people. That sentiment was eloquently evoked at the ceremony by Nancy Koska, who had been Verso’s humanresources employee. Many of the 175 employees who lost jobs with the loss of Verso have found new jobs. Some have re-trained for completely different kinds of jobs. Some have pulled up stakes and moved to other areas in search of work. And, no doubt, sadly, some former Verso employees and their families are still struggling, trying to find work and to make ends meet. Our hearts go out to them. We wish them the very best and hope and pray they may soon find a happy and secure life once again.
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At 100, ‘Rite of Spring’ still startles One of the cultural landmarks of the 20th Century, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, turned 100 just two days ago. And what a cataclysmic birth it was! The equivalent of an earthquake, a volcano, a revolution, all happening at once. The Rite is a 35-minute ballet/orchestral work first performed in a Paris theater May 29, 1913, choreographed by legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was a member of Sergei Diaghilev’s famed Russian Ballet. The music and the style of dancing were so shockingly new the audience erupted into pandemonium. At first there was derisive laughter, boos, jeers, then audience members began throwing things at each other before tossing things at the orchestra. Forty people had to be ejected from the theater. The audience uproar was so loud the music could not be heard. The near riot should have been expected because the Rite jabs listeners like a jolt of disturbing adrenalin. Stravinsky, like Picasso, was one of the giant masters of modernism. He had created a kind of musical equivalent of Picasso’s cubist paintings, a radically new way of expressing a multiplicity of visual and psychological realities. Picasso ripped reality apart and reassembled it in stunning new ways. Stravinsky did the same thing – only in music. The Rite chugs along like some thrashing,
Dennis Dalman Editor wounded, hideous beast. It has a primitive, elemental, violent feel to it with its weird syncopations, ferocious dissonances, eerie creepy-crawly rhythms, swooning meanderings, relentless stompings and poundings, gnome-like grunts and squeaks, eruptive crescendos, dizzying pirouettes, whispery warnings, blaring alarms, gyrations and spasms, shattering explosions and the strange beauty of the delicate little melodies that weave in and out of the chaos. The Rite is disturbing music. Its cataclysmic, frightening sounds conjure images of violence and war, as if Stravinsky was expressing, musically, the horrors that were to come in the 20th Century. World War I started less than a year after Rite was first performed. In making his masterpiece, Stravinsky used bits and pieces of Russian folk music, then remade them radically into the Rite. The work is based on pagan rituals to welcome spring, including the tribal selection of a young girl as a sacrificial victim, who then has to dance herself to death as the tribal elders watch.
Many people might be familiar with The Rite of Spring from having seen Fantasia, the groundbreaking Walt Disney film of 1940. Disney expertly chose selections from the ballet score to use with his visual evocation of the earth’s beginnings, ending with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Almost like a virus, the Rite has “infected” countless pieces of modern music, including background music for movies and TV shows. The ballet’s syncopated stomping sounds are often used to evoke suspense in crime shows. The brassy dissonances in Rite have been mimicked to express a sense of emotional crisis in many movies. It’s possible to hear echoes of Rite and two earlier Stravinsky works (Firebird and Petrouchka) in movies as varied as The Wizard of Oz, Psycho and Spartacus. I must hasten to add, dear readers, that even though the Rite is a brooding, strange, disturbing work, it’s also exhilarating in its sheer power and eerie beauty. It still sounds amazingly modern, as if it were composed just yesterday. On YouTube, there are a number of videos of orchestras performing The Rite of Spring, and there are even various versions of the ballet being performed, so you can watch the dancers while you hear the music. It’s a very great musical landmark so, please, do check it out.
Letter to editor
Connection says ‘thank you Newsleader for all you do’ Gerri Boser, Sartell Senior Connection The Sartell Senior Connection would like to thank the Sartell Newsleader for
your tremendous support this past year for our projects. We especially want to thank you for the recent ads for our Lemonade and Laughter event which
was a great success. We appreciate all the Newsleader does for our organization!
Transistor radio was link to outside world When I was a wee lad growing up in the country near a small Central Minnesota burg called Pearl Lake, I didn’t have many entertainment choices. We had a TV, of course, and it got a whopping four channels. (And we had to get up and change the channel by turning a knob!) We also had a hi-fi stereo I loved listening to music on — 45 rpm records my older siblings and I would buy for less than a dollar. The other device I had was a transistor radio. Anyone younger than 30 probably doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But my transistor radio was my constant companion, especially in the summer time when I was outdoors and wanted to listen to music. I remember my transistor radio well. It was an army-green color with red knobs. I probably liked it for that reason alone, since my brothers and I would often play pretend “army” games. The radio looked like a miniature version of those walkietalkies soldiers used in Vietnam. It was fueled by a single battery, and I could pull in two radio stations I loved listening to. One was KDWB out of the
Mike Nistler Reporter Twin Cities and the other was WDGY out of Chicago. Both of those stations played the pop music that was popular at the time — the Beatles, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Bee Gees and of course artists like the Archies and other “Bubble Gum” groups. The transistor radio was my connection to the outside world. It helped me pass the time between doing chores and playing endless games of baseball or football with my brothers and friends. I could take the radio into the backyard and be by myself and at the same time be in touch with what was going on in that great big world beyond our farmyard. Today, my “transistor radio” of choice is my Blackberry smart phone. I can punch in stations like Pandora and listen to the very same music I listened to then. I just choose a station like the one I’m listening to now, which I selected for one of
my favorite artists of that era, The Lovin’ Spoonful. With a few clicks I can hear songs by not only Lovin’ Spoonful but other musicians and groups that play similar kinds of music from that era. It kind of takes me back in time to that earlier, simpler time. But now, I don’t have to buy batteries, nor do I have to hold the radio up against my ear just to ensure the radio waves come in clear. And if I don’t like a song, I just click a button and it skips to the next artist. I have to admit it might be nice to have a D.J. like True Don Blue announce the next song and artist, but if I don’t know who is singing what song, I just have to tap into the main screen and it shows me who is singing and the name of the song. I guess I would’ve never imagined technology would change so much in 50 years. But even though this is much higher-quality music, I still wish I had that old transistor radio. I’m not sure what happened to it. It probably got set aside as I grew up and ended up in the trash heap somewhere. It doesn’t matter, because in my memory that old-green radio plays on.
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